Proponents say the tiny, as-yet unnamed town will become a Central
American beacon of job creation and investment, by combining secure
property rights with minimal government interference.

“Once we provide a sound legal system within which to do business,
the whole job creation machine – the miracle of capitalism – will get
going,” Michael Strong, CEO of the MKG Group, which will build the city
and set its laws, told FoxNews.com.

Strong said that the agreement with the Honduran government states that the only tax will be on property.

“Our goal is to be the most economically free entity on Earth,” Strong said.

Honduran leaders hope that the city will lead to an economic boom for
the poverty-stricken country south of Mexico. The average income in
Honduras is $4,400 a year.

“[It] will bring a lot of investment into the country [and be] a
center for many employment opportunities for our people,” Honduran
President Porfirio Lobo Sosa has said.

The laws in the city will be separate from those in the rest of
Honduras. Strong said that the default law that will be enforced in the
city will actually be based on Texas state law, which has relatively few
regulations.

“It will be Texas law with more freedom of contract. Texas scores well on state economic freedom rankings,” he explained.

“Texas law is also very familiar to American business people, and it
is very familiar to Hondurans, because a lot of Hondurans have gone
there or have family there.”

Investors who think the city will do well will also be able to buy land there.

“There will be a free market in land,” Strong said.

The rules for immigrating to the city have yet to be finalized, but are expected to be loose.

“It will be designed to be very welcoming to those with a minimum
threshold of skills or capital,” Strong said. However, businesses in the
city will be required to employ a minimum proportion of native
Hondurans – a requirement imposed at the outset by the Honduran
government to ensure that the city’s benefits largely go to Hondurans.

To insure the city against political change, the Honduran Legislature
has agreed that a two-thirds majority will be required to interfere
with the city.

MKG will invest $15 million to begin
building basic infrastructure for the first model city near Puerto
Castilla on the Caribbean coast, said Juan Hernandez, president of the
Honduran Congress. That first city would create 5,000 jobs over the next
six months and up to 200,000 jobs in the future, Hernandez said.

Strong said construction could begin in months.

“First, we will build the critical infrastructure -- roads, water,
power, sewers," Strong said. "In collaboration with the [Honduran]
government, we will then create the city’s government system and the
security, and 3 to 6 months after that we will build the first
factories.”

The MKG Group city is the first to get approval, but Honduras plans to create other “free cities” as well.

The bill to allow the creation of such cities passed the Honduran
Legislature nearly unanimously, by a vote of 126 to 1. But not everyone
is on board with the project. Left-wing Hondurans have filed a complaint before the Honduran Supreme Court, arguing that the free cities project
violates their constitution and treats “national territory as a
commodity.”

The indigenous Garifuna people in Honduras also have protested the
creation of free cities, saying that they are worried the cities will be
built on their land.

Strong said that they need not worry.

“The media reports are full of inaccuracies. We're not even remotely
close to [the Garifuna]. We're literally hundreds of miles away,” he
said.

Additionally, the new city will be built on unoccupied land.

“We will be selecting unoccupied land so that everyone will be opting in by choice,” Strong said.

But some oppose the project being built anywhere in Honduras.

“I can't help but suspect that the promise of plenty of jobs is
nothing but a Trojan horse,” Teofilo Colon Jr., who runs the Garifuna
cultural group Being Garifuna, told FoxNews.com.

“The prospect of setting up a charter city, with its own laws, [that]
is sovereign to itself and doesn't have to pay taxes, is a dubious one
at best. It'd be tantamount to inviting pirates to come in and have free
reign to essentially raid the country's resources/riches.”

The MKG Group says its plan, however, is not to take advantage of
natural resources, but rather to attract entrepreneurs using good laws
and low taxes.

Strong cited Hong Kong as a city that prospered under that model.

“Hong Kong’s poverty once was roughly on the level of Africa. Today it is one of the wealthiest places.”

Strong says that the same could happen in Honduras.

“We'll see Hondurans having more jobs, higher income, and more security than they've ever had.”